David Harvey: The Enigma of Capital

"In the 70s I cut out a cartoon from a newspaper that hang on my wall for several days. I called it the Snoopy problem. Snoopy decides to write a novel and the cartoon shows the bubbles of his brainstorming: It was dark and stormy outside. Suddenly a shot went out somewhere. I heard the door slam. Lightening pierced the sky. It gets darker and scarier. Somewhere a king lives in luxury. In Kansas a little boy is growing up. Part 2: I need to bring all these together in Part 2."

­­­"In the 70s the labour was stronger than the capital and the latter responded in several ways, trying to break it. How? Migration. But this caused some intense headache: intensified racism, for instance. Then it started offshoring, which meant passing across boundaries, opening up.

80s: labour problem solved in general: low wage, low profit economy and redistribution of resources in the upper classes. Wage repression caused another problem: how would people buy products? The answer: give them credit cards. Markets started operating in the past and future. There was a time gap which was filled by financiers."

"The solution? Co-revolution on various levels Marx was talking about: social, technological, intellectual, in our relations which nature, etc. Social control over surplus, and this does not necessarily mean state control. This solution asks for lots of imagination and creativity.

You can't be in an anti-poverty movement without also starting an anti-wealth one, can you?

I see an intellectual problem here. We academics continue to teach how to make wealth out of other people's bankruptcy. All we've done is add a short course on business ethics. When economists and academics tried to explain to the Queen the causes of the crisis and they talked about systemic risks, no academics asked for the discussion on the nature of these risks."